According to a new report by South China Morning Post, the parent company behind TikTok, Bytedance, is reportedly going “all in” on generative AI.
The report further adds that Bytedance is making substantial changes to bring generative AI on board. The Chinese conglomerate is in the process of augmenting its AI team, enhancing its corporate framework, and intensifying its foundational research initiatives.
Embracing a full-throttle approach to AI, Bytedance considers the advancement in this technology as a critical challenge that it is determined to win.
These substantial investments have made over 300 vacancies available at the company that are related to AI. Over a hundred of these positions have to do with large language models (LLM), the brains behind generative AI models.
While Bytedance has gained acclaim for its pioneering TikTok recommendation algorithm—a key factor in the platform’s explosive growth—it has been somewhat tardy in initiating research into LLMs.
Following OpenAI’s mid-February launch of the Sora video generator, Bytedance acknowledged that its own AI video animation tool, Boximator, introduced in early February, is comparatively in the early stages of development.
A spokesperson from Bytedance said: “It still has a big gap with leading video generation models in terms of image quality, fidelity and duration.”
Bytedance is channeling significant resources into AI research, having launched a variety of AI models. It is reportedly developing a range of AI-driven products, from text-to-image and text-to-video technologies to the CapCut video editing tool.
In mid-January 2024, Bytedance introduced MagicVideo-V2, an AI model that transforms text into video. This model surpasses existing text-to-video (T2V) systems by employing a suite of integrated modules designed to produce videos of superior quality.
Similar to OpenAI’s GPT Maker, Bytedance has also unveiled its own platform to let users create custom chatbots tailored to specific needs. These custom chatbots operate similarly to OpenAI’s GPTs and are a part of Bytedance’s broader vision of integrating generative AI into its products.
Bytedance recently got its ChatGPT account suspended once it was caught using GPT 4 to train its own AI models. The Chinese company denies these claims.
